True, guns don’t kill people. Angry, deranged, disturbed, people do. People with a grudge, people with something to prove, people wanting notoriety, people with an agenda. But all those madmen (of the 43 mass shootings in this country in the last twenty or so years, only one was committed by a woman) would not have had the capacity to be as deadly if they had been unable to get their hands on guns and rifles and AK-47’s.In light of what has happened in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, all other issues, concerns and arguments, everything which, till today, has occupied and/or divided us, pales into insignificance by comparison. It is why I have removed the petition on higher taxes for the rich from my blog. I can’t see that it matters, not just now. I was, for a brief moment, tempted to replace it with one calling for stricter control of firearms, but this is not the time. This is the time to think of the twenty children and six adults who lost their lives to bullets, shot out of guns in the hands of a person who should have never, ever had access to them in the first place!My heartfelt condolences to the families of the victims, their friends and colleagues, to the residents of Newtown, and indeed, to this nation.A.J. Aston
